


Certified Weird

by Sholio



Category: Iron Fist (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: F/F, Getting Together, Magical Accidents, Magical Artifacts, Quests, mention of past Danny/Colleen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-13
Updated: 2020-02-13
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:22:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22597003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Magical artifact in a New Jersey storage unit? Same weird shit, different day.
Relationships: Misty Knight/Colleen Wing
Comments: 10
Kudos: 30
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	Certified Weird

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lilacsigil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilacsigil/gifts).



The storage unit was in a bank of concrete and metal boxes out in Jersey, and it was the kind of day that did the Jersey shore no favors, with sleet spitting from a low gray sky. Colleen got lost twice driving to it, even with phone GPS. She didn't actually drive that much; she only had a car because Danny had left it behind, and she wished now that she'd taken an Uber.

But she'd found the right place, because Misty's black sedan, or one just like it, was parked just inside an open security gate. There were a couple of police cruisers around, but no one else in sight, aside from a moving van a long way down the row of units with a couple of guys in coveralls unloading things, ignoring the cops in that classic Jersey way.

The units were gray with orange-painted doors. Several of the doors were rolled up, and a strand of yellow police tape was strung loosely down the row, sagging and flapping in the wind. Colleen turned up her collar against the intermittent spats of rain and stepped around a half-frozen puddle.

"Misty?"

"Back here," came from within one of the units, echoing hollowly.

Colleen ducked under the tape and peered around a pile of boxes. The unit was considerably deeper than it looked, and Misty was wedged into the recesses of the place, holding a flashlight with a clipboard tucked under her arm, poking around with her metal hand. What was unboxed looked like typical moving-sale stuff, an old rocking horse and a stack of chairs and a heavy dresser with old clothing draped carelessly over the top.

"You had to get me out here on a Saturday, huh?"

"Hell, if I have to be out here." Misty flashed her a grin. It made her knees weak, that grin; it always had. Colleen had to look away, look around at the close cinderblock walls instead.

"And I'm out here, why? You said you had something you needed me to look at."

"Yeah. C'mon back."

Colleen sighed and climbed over a stack of boxes, dropping down to join Misty in the back. It was warmer back here, or at least it seemed so, with the cold, dripping world largely closed off by boxes. She and Misty were insulated into their own little world.

Misty had pulled the tops off several boxes. The nearest one contained dishes wrapped in newspaper. A couple of them were unwrapped. The cardboard box beside it held DVDs.

"Fascinating," Colleen said.

"Ha ha." Misty had to step over a box to turn around. They were all but wedged together; her arm brushed Colleen's. Despite the November cold, she was wearing a tight red sweater with no jacket. Unfair. "So all of this belongs to a shop owner, resaler, and small-time black marketeer called Pettyjohn. Petty, as he says his friends call him, like he has any, specializes in buying up tons of old shit, selling anything valuable, and tossing the rest. He has about a dozen units in this building."

"I have got to assume you didn't have me drive all the way out to Jersey just to show me a storage unit full of some pawnshop owner's junk."

She actually had a suspicion of the sort of thing Misty might have wanted her to take a look at; it was the only kind of thing that really would be worth driving out from the city, and her hand twitched for her katana, which was in the backseat of Danny's car. But she didn't see anything that was visibly ... well ... weird. No ancient lamps with suspiciously well-polished sides, no mystic scrolls, no swords with acid-etched blades ...

"No, you're right," Misty said. "I needed you to look at this."

She reached for the clothing draped over the top of the dresser, and as she pulled it off Colleen realized _that_ was where her jacket had gone; it had been thrown over what turned out to be a medium-sized round silver mirror. Misty pulled her jacket on while Colleen looked curiously at the mirror and dresser top. It was a rotating mirror in an ornate silver frame. The mirror was currently tipped toward the ceiling and showing mostly concrete.

"Um," Colleen said.

"Flip it down."

Colleen couldn't help noticing that Misty had gone very tense beside her. That was ... not normal. She reached out cautiously. 

The silver rim of the mirror was very cold to the touch, not just the normal chill of the Jersey coast in November, but so cold that Colleen jerked her hand back; it felt like the icy cold of flash-frozen fingertips, the way your hand can stick to metal things in January.

"Oh, right, sorry. Here." Misty reached out with her metal hand -- reaching past Colleen, who couldn't help noticing the warmth of her body -- and flipped it down.

It now showed the storage unit and boxes, exactly as you'd expect, with one key difference.

" _Um,"_ Colleen said again. She and Misty weren't there. The mirror reflected the unit's crowded interior exactly, perfect in every detail, except they weren't in it.

Misty flipped it around to face the wall. "I don't know a whole lot about this sort of thing, I mean, this is _your_ sort of thing." She sounded almost accusing. "But I feel like it's probably not good to stare into it for too long. I mean, I _did_ read fairy tales when I was a kid."

"Uh, probably not," Colleen said faintly.

"And that's not the only thing in here like this." Misty turned to prod the top of a box. "For the most part, it's just a lot of junk and knockoff DVDs and that kind of thing. And then every once in a while, there's something like that. Or this." 

She pulled a shawl out of the box, or maybe a scarf. It looked like it had been knit from coarse wool yarn dyed blue and red, and probably would have fit right in at any of the Bayard Center's various community donation drives.

With a certain amount of visible embarrassment, Misty threw it over her head like a scarf and let the coarse, knitted loops settle down over her chest and torso.

And she disappeared.

Or ... not disappeared, exactly. Colleen was still vaguely aware of her. And yet, not. It was as if Misty had faded into the shadows in the back of the storage unit, and she was still basically there, except Colleen had to kind of look at her sideways to see her.

"So did it work?" Misty said, and Colleen jumped. "This was the first thing they found, and then after the mirror, they called me, because I guess I have a tri-state reputation for working with the weird shit. I mean, I can't exactly check the results myself, except with that creepy mirror which is no help at all for obvious reasons."

Colleen wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. "Yeah, it worked." She reached out and poked Misty lightly with her fingertip. She ended up somewhere in the rib region, and jerked her hand back guiltily. "What does it feel like?"

"Nothing at all. Things are perfectly normal in here. Maybe a little dimmer than usual." Misty reappeared, solid and present and smiling ruefully, in the act of unslinging the scarf/shawl/whatever it was from her head. "So yeah. Figured I'd call you. Because if I have a grade school education in Weird Shit, you have the PhD."

"I wouldn't exactly say that." Colleen's voice came out a bit dry. She reached out, asked a question with her eyebrows, and Misty placed the fabric in her hands. It was weirdly light, with a rough, squeaky texture to the knit. Colleen turned it over in her hands, stretched it out between, then tentatively threw it over her head.

She felt the difference immediately. Misty might not be able to, but Colleen worked with qi as a practitioner. And she instantly felt that it was doing something, damping down her energy, not in a way that felt particularly dangerous but definitely affecting it.

It also smelled like musty sheep. 

With a shudder, she hastily pulled it off and handed it back to Misty, who, after a moment, began to roll it up.

"So what the actual fuck," Colleen said.

"My sentiments exactly."

***

"Petty says he has no idea what this stuff is. It's all part of several different lots he bought sight unseen at auction," Misty said, over coffee (for Misty) and shitty lukewarm Lipton's tea for Colleen at the nearest café they'd been able to find that was open on a late, rainy Saturday afternoon.

"Do you believe him?"

"I don't really see any reason not to. He's not exactly the ..." Misty waved the fingers of her left hand by her ear. "... woo-woo type."

They had found, so far, five items that were "certified weird" (Misty's term). One of them, the mirror, was impossible to move due to being attached to the dresser. Two, the invisibility shawl and a small flowered china pot laced with a latticework of brownish cracks, its interior seeming to contain only darkness even when you shone a light into it, were wrapped thoroughly in numerous layers of plastic in Misty's trunk. One was wrapped in a tissue in Colleen's pocket, a ring that seemed to be able to collect light and glow for awhile in the dark -- not really unusual, it could easily be phosphorescent costume jewelry except that it looked very old and appeared to be made of genuine silver and some kind of valuable-looking rock.

And then there was the thing they'd laid out on the table beside their coffee and donuts.

It was a wide belt. Colleen recognized it as a tablet weave, not especially fancy. It was made from some kind of coarse natural fiber in two colors, straw yellow and dark brown, forming a set of checkerboard V's. It had long, dangly tassels on the ends, and was frayed around the edges, and generally looked old and beat-up, like all of their Weird Shit.

But she had been able to tell as soon as she put her hands on it that it was another Weird Shit item. The only way she could describe it was that it interacted strangely with her qi, which Misty hated, but, well ... it did. It seemed to have life of its own, in a way that she normally would have associated with a living thing, perhaps not a cat or a horse, but more like a tree or a river, old and deep.

Misty googled "magic belts" on her phone. After wading through a lot of irrelevant results and a few vaguely alarming ones, they had gone down the rabbit hole of mythological belts and girdles. Mythically speaking, it seemed that magic belts did one of two things: they either conferred strength, invulnerability, and power on the wearer, or made people fall in love with you.

"I hope it's the first one," Colleen said as they took turns reading Misty's phone in the middle of the table between them. "That sounds a lot more useful."

"One of us could put it on and find out," Misty suggested.

"Yeah, and turn you into a lust zombie drooling over me," Colleen said, a shiver working its way through her core. She realized she was running her fingers through the belt's long tassels and pulled her hand away. "That'd be the worst."

"Very," Misty agreed solemnly, but with a flash of light in her eyes, that wry amusement that was never far from her. "On the other hand, I would really love being a bulletproof cop."

"How about a cop who every perp gets the instant hots for?"

"Hmm. A definite argument against screwing with ..." She made a face. ".... please don't make me say it."

"Magic?"

"I told you not to make me say it."

"You didn't," Colleen pointed out, flashing her a grin.

Misty laughed. Colleen found herself warming in the glow of Misty's delight.

"I think I should text a picture of this to Danny," she said, busying herself with her phone. "All of this, actually. I'm not the weird-stuff PhD around this dojo; he is. He might have run into something similar before."

"So what's the deal with you two, anyway?" Misty asked, her voice casual, as Colleen tried to hold up her phone camera to get a good shot of the belt. "You, like, on a break, or what?"

"We're friends." Colleen worked on the photo framing, aware that this was the thing that had been the elephant in the room for a long time, worked around but never quite brought out into the open. Maybe she didn't want to admit that a door had already closed, opening others in the same motion. 

"Friends, hey?"

"It's not a bad thing, being friends." She was defensive, and didn't want to be.

"No," Misty said, gentle, resting her chin in her hand, and Colleen's defensiveness slid out of her. "It's not."

It was such a permeable line, after all. She had been friends with Danny first, had faded back into friendship at some point along the line, and felt less of a sense of loss than she had expected. 

Misty said, "I slept with Luke, did I ever mention that? Back in the day."

"Hey, I'd hit that." Colleen took a new shot from a different angle, and texted the pictures to Danny with the message, _Ever seen one before? Weird qi. Let me know._

"Right? That's one fine man."

"I'll tell Claire you said so."

Misty laughed again. Colleen put down her phone and wondered if trying out the girdle was really the worst idea. Once you admitted what you wanted, it was just a small step from there to getting it, after all.

"I really wouldn't mind hanging onto the invisible afghan thing," Misty mused. "It's not like we've logged 'em in Evidence yet."

So probably it just figured that they got a call from the Jersey unit just then, informing Misty that one of the investigating Jersey officers had gone missing while investigating the storage unit with the mirror in it.

***

"Eaten," Misty said. "By a mirror that looks like it belongs to my grandma."

"He could have gone to get something to eat," said the cop she was talking to, not sounding overly convinced.

"His car's still here."

"Okay, yeah, you got a point."

It was almost dusk now, and raining harder, freezing on windshields, with the puddles turning ice-slick underfoot. Colleen had the girdle rolled up in her pocket, stuffed down on top of the maybe-costume-jewelry light-ring. She wasn't entirely sure what she planned to do with it. She also wished she'd brought a raincoat.

She stood around while the Jersey PD hauled out floodlights and closed the security gates to keep random bystanders away. Her phone buzzed with a text from Danny.

_Never seen anything like it, sorry! I can ask around?_

_That'd be great, thanks,_ she texted back, typing with half-numb fingers. She hoped for his sake that he was somewhere tropical and not in Siberia or the Outer Hebrides. _Run something else by you, if you have a minute?_

_Sure, go for it._

_Have you ever heard anything about mirrors that eat people?_

There was a brief pause. _Say what now?_

_Hang on, I'll send a picture._

She went past the cops -- someone moved to stop her and Misty said something to him, and he let her by. "Be careful in there," Misty called to Colleen.

"Just gonna take a picture for Danny," Colleen called back.

It was bitterly cold in the storage unit, the damp evening air definitely below freezing already. Someone had draped a sheet over the bureau -- understandably enough. Colleen pulled it off, and shivered right down to her bones when she realized the mirror was pointed right at her, reflecting the wall behind her but not her at all.

Careful careful. She stepped off to the side, held up the phone camera. The first shot, holding the phone out to the side so she didn't have to look at it, came out mostly the wall instead. She edged back and lined up the phone, looking through that so she still wasn't looking at it directly.

Huh, weird, the camera was putting a green cast on it. She tapped the controls, trying to even out the colors. No, just in the mirror --

Colleen looked up from her phone. She was standing in a green meadow. The sun was shining very brightly overhead.

"Oh my actual fuck," she said out loud. Way to be careful with a weirdo magic artifact. She was _never_ going to live this down.

***

After ten minutes or so, she had determined the following data points:

\- No reception on her phone.

\- Nothing visible in sight except rolling hills and more rolling hills. Green. Lots of green. Very warm. Some flowers. Pastoral. Idyllic.

\- No signs of lost Jersey PD officers. Everyone gets sent somewhere different? This is actually the afterlife and everyone gets a different one? (Bad thought. Do not follow up.)

There was nothing in sight that looked like it might take her back. She sighed, took off her jacket and draped it over her arm, and started walking.

The rolling hills sloped gently down into a valley full of trees with a little stream. Colleen decided to follow the stream on the general principle that it might lead her somewhere. It also occurred to her that she could drink from it if she really had to, though she wasn't particularly thirsty yet, or hungry, having just had tea and donuts with Misty not too long ago.

Misty ... who hopefully wasn't going bonkers trying to find her back in Jersey. Would Misty come through after her? _Could_ she?

And where the hell _was_ this, anyway? If the time zones checked out, it must be somewhere either west of where she'd been (Great Plains? central Canada?) or all the way on the other side of the world. But Colleen had a worried feeling, as she picked her way through the rocks and tangles of brush along the streambank, that she might not still be in the world at all. If not for Danny and K'un Lun, she would have dismissed the idea entirely, but he'd literally spent fifteen years of his life _somewhere else._

And Colleen thought she was somewhere else now. 

There was no particular reason why this _couldn't_ be Earth. The sky was the right color of blue, with a few high, wispy clouds. The sun was perfectly normal.

But there was a stillness to the air, to the world, that she didn't know how to explain otherwise. There were no jets. No telephone lines. Not a single windblown plastic bag or half-buried beer can in the dirt; no footpaths or cows or old stone walls. Insects humming in the grass, a occasional bird, and the soft chuckle of the water in its bed of stones were the only sounds to disturb the silence.

And yes, there _were_ still places that unspoiled; she'd been in a few of them. But she felt like there was simply something _different_ about this place. The air was cleaner somehow, and richer, as if it had more oxygen.

And then she was sure of it when she came around a bend in the stream, and saw the griffin.

It was sunning itself on a very large boulder in the middle of the stream, which had gotten fairly wide now and divided around the boulder in a froth of miniature white breakers. The griffin looked exactly like a storybook griffin -- a long tawny lion body, folded amber-colored wings, and the head of an impossibly enormous bird of prey.

It turned to look at her. Colleen dropped her jacket and grabbed the nearest thing that could possibly be used as a weapon, a stray piece of driftwood about three feet long. She wished she had her katana, but this would have to do. She concentrated, reaching for the wellspring of energy that now lived inside her, and the stick of wood lit up with heatless white flame.

She hadn't been sure that would work. She'd never tried it with anything other than the katana before.

She stood on the edge of the stream gripping the stick like a road flare. Cautiously she reached down and retrieved her jacket, then began to move again, backing away from the stream into the woods. She could simply go around. _Way_ around. The griffin was at least the size of a normal lion, if not bigger.

It opened its beak, and said in a deep voice, "What are you looking for, dragon's daughter?"

Colleen nearly dropped her stick.

The weirdest thing was ... well, okay, _all of this,_ but at least the second or third weirdest thing was that, while she couldn't tell what language it was speaking, she was positive she shouldn't be able to understand it. Colleen was fluently trilingual, and she was very sure that whatever language was being used here, it wasn't English, Mandarin, or Japanese.

This definitely added another tick in the plus column for "you are somewhere else now."

"I'm sorry?" she said, deciding to stick with English since it was what she was most familiar with lately, and it didn't really seem to matter all that much.

"Nothing to be sorry for." Its voice was a bass rumble; she seemed to feel it through the soles of her feet.

"No ... I mean ..." She took a breath and lowered the stick slowly; it was draining to keep it powered up. "What makes you think I'm looking for something?"

The griffin sat up, and chattered its beak in a bird-of-prey kind of way; then it said, "You have a questing look about you."

"Well, I _am_ trying to get home. I don't belong here. I came here through ... a magic mirror." She said it quickly to get it out of the way. At least Misty wasn't around to laugh at her.

"Yes, you do feel not of this place," the griffin agreed gravely. "However, I can't help you with that."

 _Well, what good are you then?_ was probably not a great thing to say to an animal the size of a schoolbus that was made of several apex predators welded together. "Could you direct me to someone who might be able to help me, then?"

The griffin chattered its beak again, and began grooming its head feathers with an enormous lion paw. "What will you give me?"

Oh fuck no, it was one of _those_ kinds of things. Colleen never particularly wanted to be on a fairy tale quest of any sort, particularly now, when she just wanted to be back in New Jersey. (Words she had never thought she'd find herself thinking, but here she was.) Also, she had next to nothing on her, certainly nothing she could readily afford to lose. 

"My jacket?" she suggested, holding it out. She wasn't using it at the moment, after all.

The griffin switched to grooming one of its massive wings, and Colleen was distracted by the sheer enormity of the feathers, the way they spread out on the rock. "What would I do with that?" it inquired, between nibbling the huge pinions with its beak, smoothing away invisible dirt.

"Er ... nothing much, I suppose." She started to drape the jacket over her arm, and was reminded by the bulge in the pocket that she had other things as well, the light-up ring and the belt or girdle or whatever it was. She thought about putting the belt on and trying her luck, but it would just figure that it was the love-spell one and the griffin would fall madly in love with her. 

"Magic belt," she tried, holding it up.

"Human thing," the griffin sneered. 

Cats liked shiny things, and it _was_ part cat. She flashed the ring. "What about this?"

"Let me see it."

She tossed the ring. The griffin snapped it out of the air with its massive beak and set it down on the top of the boulder. "Hmmm," it said, examining it with first one large bird eye, then the other. "I will accept this and a story."

"A story?" Colleen said, in panic. "What sort of story?" Stupid magic mirrors. She was breaking that thing when she got back to Jersey. 

"Tell it and I will judge," the griffin said, spreading out its other wing to resume grooming itself.

Great; what kind of story would appeal to a giant bird/lion?

She didn't really intend to, but she found herself telling the story of their assault on Midland Circle: how Misty had lost her arm, how Colleen had defeated Bakuto once and for all. It surprised her, somewhat, to find how the sharp edges had worn off those memories; it was not a time in her life she liked thinking about, but it _did_ make a good story, full of rescues and derring-do, the victory of good, the defeat of evil ... as long as she spun it a certain way and left out certain things. Most of the stories in her life were much less clean, with endings that trailed into messy loose ends rather than snapping off neatly.

When she was done, the griffin thought about it for a minute or two, and then gestured with its head. "It is a good story. Try the barrow. It might take you to your maiden."

"I -- the -- thank you." She was suddenly glad Misty was not here to hear herself referred to as Colleen's maiden, though it would probably have entertained her. "Where's the barrow, and how will I know it when I see it?" Please, she thought, tell me I'm not going to have to ride back home in a wheelbarrow.

If the griffin heard her, it ignored her. It went back to cat-style grooming, pawing over its great head.

Right, Colleen thought. Misty would be going out of her everloving _mind_ back in Jersey. There was certainly no sign of her here. Also, it seemed to her as she resumed striding along the stream, turning her head to avoid losing sight of the griffin, that the sun hadn't moved since she'd been here. 

Maybe it was just moving slowly. She hoped.

The sides of the valley closed in here, making it more like a canyon, with the stream -- now more of a small river -- at its center and brush clogging the banks, forcing Colleen to walk in the water more than once. But when she came upon the barrow, she saw it easily, above the brush, a dark slot leading into the hillside with tall, flat stones for doorposts and lintels. That was about the point when she remembered that "barrow" had a different meaning without the word "wheel" appended to the front of it.

Colleen climbed up to it. She peered inside, thinking of the ceramic jar with its impenetrable darkness, but this turned out to be perfectly normal darkness. Just when that ring would have come in handy, too. Well, she'd held onto the stick, and it lit up again at her will, turning it into an impromptu torch -- probably not a K'un-Lun approved use of the Iron Fist, but it was what she needed at the moment. The barrow had a dry, sandy floor and a low stone ceiling, just above Colleen's head. Good thing she was short. It did not look even remotely earthquake-safe.

"Hello?" Colleen called. Her voice echoed in the dark.

Well ... hell. It wasn't like she had any other leads. And she was a living weapon, damn it. Nothing to worry about.

She released her qi from the Fist and used her phone for a flashlight instead, since it didn't wear her down in the same way. The barrow went straight into the hillside for about twenty feet and then turned sharply, becoming so narrow that she had to turn sideways to squeeze through. There was light up ahead, surprisingly bright -- so bright, in fact, that when she got out of the narrow part, she could barely see and missed the next unexpectedly long step down.

She fell on her face in hot sand.

Colleen scrambled to her feet, shaking off sand. She was on the side of a sand dune. It looked like it was nearing sunset; the sky had a pinkish tinge, the sun was low and the dunes shadowed with blue. The air was bakingly hot. Of whatever portal had brought her here, there was no sign.

"Oh for fuck's sake!" she yelled at the top of her lungs. That was the last time she was taking advice from a mythological creature of any sort.

"Colleen! Oh, thank _God,"_ said a familiar and incredibly welcome voice behind her. 

Colleen spun around, and there was Misty, scrambling toward her across the dunes, beaming at her. She'd tied her jacket around her head like a turban to help keep the sun off.

She swept Colleen up in a hug, and Colleen, without really thinking about it, planted a kiss on her lips -- closed-mouthed, but definitely not chaste. Misty kissed back enthusiastically, so _that_ happened, and then Misty let her go and Colleen wobbled a bit before catching her balance.

"So did some jerkass griffin send you here too?" Colleen asked.

"Griffin? ... no, that fucking mirror did. I guess." Misty looked like she couldn't believe she was saying it. "We've had that damn thing cordoned off ever since you went missing, but the more time that went by the more worried I got, and we've been _trying_ to get experts out from the Jersey City PD or the FBI, but did you ever try to convince a law enforcement agency to cough up some experts in mystic artifacts? We've got an art-crimes guy and a kidnapping negotiator on the scene now, for whatever that's worth."

Colleen managed to turn her laugh into a cough, thinking of an increasingly exasperated Misty trying to act as a go-between mediating the magic world with the mundane. "How long was I gone?"

"About three hours, give or take -- at least, that's the last point I could tell you for sure. I think I've been here for about an hour or so, I guess, though it's hard to tell with all this fucking sand."

Colleen thought that it didn't feel like she'd been in the grasslands for four hours, but she had already decided that things didn't quite work the same there. Also, it was slowly dawning on her that Misty had gotten worried enough to come through the mirror on _purpose,_ which was something she felt vaguely guilty about, even as it warmed her from her chest outward.

"But since you're an _actual_ expert on mystical shit, I don't suppose you've got any ideas for getting us back to the real world," Misty was saying.

"I wish." Colleen looked around. It was starkly beautiful here, the long blue shadows of the dunes and the pink sky tinting the sand, turning the world into a dual-colored painting. There was no sign of anything that wasn't sand. "I wonder why it brought me there and you here?"

"Where did it take you? What'd you get?"

"Grass, mostly," Colleen said. "Nicer than here. At least there was water." She was starting to really wish she'd taken a drink from the stream, even at the risk of giardia or god knew what.

"Search me." Misty shrugged. "Anyway, you found your way here, right? How'd you do it? Maybe we could do the same thing and get back home."

"I wish. It wasn't anything I did." Though she was starting to wonder about that. Could this world, whatever it was, somehow respond to their desires? It seemed unlikely that she would have come out within easy walking distance of a portal to Misty and a guide to get her there.

Actually, this whole place was unlikely in the extreme. Were they inside the mirror somehow? She picked up a handful of sand and let it drift through her fingers. It _felt_ real.

"If you're completely done staring at sand," Misty said, "the grit is terrible for my arm joints, and my lips are drying out. Let's see if we can find a way out of here."

***

They walked together across the dunes. The sun continued to set, more slowly than Colleen felt should be the case in a tropical region, if this was indeed a tropical region, but at least it was distinctly moving, unlike the sun in the last place.

They passed the time for a little while by telling each other about what had happened since Colleen had left New Jersey. Colleen's story was a lot more engaging, based on Misty's reactions, or at least a lot weirder.

"You met a griffin. Get _out."_

"To be fair, it wasn't actually the first mythological creature I've ever met," Colleen said.

"Do tell. What was the other one?"

"A kirin -- a Japanese unicorn, they're sometimes called in English, though they aren't really like what you'd think of from that description. They're more like a sort of a cross between a deer and a lion." And, to be fair, she'd also met a pair of shishi -- guardian lions -- that she was sworn to secrecy about because they ran a bookshop in Chinatown. She had never actually seen them as lions, just as a couple of nice old guys who came into the community center sometimes. The shishi thing she'd heard secondhand, from their granddaughter.

"You know, I want to hear this story but I am positive that I'm going to need way more alcohol for it," Misty remarked. "Also, we don't seem to be getting any closer to getting out of here, I'm just saying."

They definitely weren't. The dunes stretched onward, unchanging; the only way Colleen could even tell they were making progress was by the tracks stretching out behind them, and even those were being erased in the distance by the breeze that had sprung up as the sun set. The sky blazed with vivid color now, and their shadows banded the dunes, stretching endlessly far, spreading and blotting out the pink sand and finally taking over completely as the sun slipped below the rim of the world.

Colleen was already thirsty. The air was achingly dry. If we're not out of here by the time the sun comes up, we're screwed, she thought.

"You think there's something we're supposed to do to get out of here?" Misty asked. "Like a task or something?"

She must be desperate, if she was willing to buy into the magical rules of the place even to that extent.

"It's hard to believe it's that directed." But Colleen wasn't sure. How could you be sure? It wasn't like magic mirrors came with a warning label and an instruction manual. Although they really ought to.

"When we get back," Misty said grimly as they toiled up another dune in the gathering dusk, "I'm renting the biggest truck at U-Haul, loading that thing in the back, filling it up with concrete blocks and pushing it off a garbage scow into the deepest part of the East River."

"I think we should just set it on fire," Colleen said. "Don't want to take the chance of someone dredging it up someday."

"You make a good point."

***

The sun had long set and a thin silver fingernail of moon had risen by the time they reached the oasis. After this long in the desert, Colleen would swear that she could actually smell the water. She was, at the very least, unsurprised when they clambered to the top of the next dune and there it was below them, a shimmering pool reflecting the moon. It wasn't a TV oasis, round and deep with a few tidy little palm trees; it was a sinkhole, choked with brush where the dunes hadn't reclaimed the landscape, but Colleen could feel the cold and the damp coming off it as they scrambled down the dune to the water's edge.

"Wait," she said, catching Misty's arm as Misty started to lean forward. "You can't just drink water you find in the wilderness, not right away. It's not safe."

Survival training with Bakuto had essentially involved being dropped in the middle of nowhere and having to find her way out. She had learned a few lessons that she'd never forgotten.

"In case you haven't noticed, we're in the middle of a desert," Misty said. There was enough light under the moon for Colleen to see Misty wet her lips with her tongue. "You see a Starbucks anywhere around here, just let me know. If it's death by dehydration or cholera, I'll risk the cholera."

"There are ways to check." Colleen used her phone's light again, shining it across the cracked mud around the water hole. There was an overlapping tapestry of tracks: delicate diamond-shaped bird tracks, the tap-tap dots of mice or shrews, the belly-crawl S-curve of a snake, a few bigger hoofed-animal tracks, and some she had no idea what they were at all. None of them were especially recent, but they also weren't accompanied by any suspicious corpses.

"The animals use it," she said, turning off the light. "So it's probably all right."

They both waded in, drinking the slightly brackish water from their bare hands and splashing it on their faces and hair. Now that the sun had set, the night was already growing cool enough that the evaporating water had a pleasant cooling effect. Colleen remembered that desert nights were cold -- at least from what she'd read; it wasn't an environment she was familiar with -- but so far, she felt in no danger of being too chilly. It just felt good.

They splashed ashore eventually and sat in the sand. Colleen's calves ached from climbing the dunes; it was like wading through snow, leaving her more exhausted than she should have been for the actual distance covered. She was also wet to the skin from their brief dip in the pond. She hesitated briefly, then stripped off her top and wrung it out. She noticed Misty doing likewise.

It gave her a chance to appreciate, even in the dim light, Misty's toned torso and the lush swell of her breasts, pooling in a bra that could have been black or blue or even red; in the near-darkness, it had a faint luster that picked it out from Misty's skin, and that was about all she could tell.

"Like what you see?" Misty asked. She was smiling.

"I do, yeah."

There was no conversation about it. Perhaps everything they'd done for the last few months had been leading up to this. They came together, across the sand. These kisses were more deliberate, more heated; full of an eagerness long suppressed and now bursting out in an intense craving to get closer, to feel more. Colleen had grown used to sleeping with another warm body in bed beside her, and now those long lonely months crawled under her skin; she wanted Misty all over her, Misty's body on hers, Misty's fingers in her.

Without talking about it, united in one purpose, they fucked by the pool on their spread-out jackets, under the moon. It wasn't the first time Colleen had made love on the ground, far from it, but at least usually she'd had a sleeping bag or a tent. She had forgotten the discomfort of it, the way the ground was both too hard and too yielding, the dirt and sand that got everywhere.

But Misty's body was long and strong and lithe, her fingers and tongue both skilled; she knew where to touch, how to touch. She brought Colleen off twice, and Colleen got her off once, and they ended up tangled together on top of the rumpled jackets with sand in their hair. Colleen felt her heart rate calming slowly, like the dropdown after a vigorous workout. She pressed a kiss to Misty's collarbone and turned her face into Misty's neck.

After a long lazy while, as sweat chilled on their bodies and the cool of the night went from welcome to uncomfortable, they got up and rinsed in the pool and put their damp, sandy clothes back on, with a few pauses for kisses and mutual appreciation of those body parts not already covered.

"I'm not taking off the arm," Misty declared. "First of all, I've already used it in ways that I'm sure Rand design specs do _not_ cover, and second, there's enough sand in it already, and if I get grit in the stump it's going to be even more of a misery than sleeping with the damn thing on."

Colleen smiled. She laid out Misty's jacket for them to lie on, at least their torsos and heads. Her own jacket could go over the top. With their torsos warm and their shared body heat, they should make it through the night okay.

"Set a guard?" Misty asked. She hadn't put her bra back on, and she was sitting up beside Colleen, silhouetted against the crystalline sky with her breasts low and heavy, nipples pushing against the fabric of her sweater.

Colleen thought about it and shook her head. "There are two of us, and you've got a metal arm and a gun, and I've got the Iron Fist. If anything decides to mess with us in the night, it's going to regret it."

Misty huffed a soft laugh. "Good point."

She lay down beside Colleen and pulled Colleen's jacket over them. They were pressed together, thigh to thigh, hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder. It was hard not to think about lying like this with Danny, but Misty was a very different presence from Danny's twitchy energy, warm and solid and steady, a wall she could press her back against.

She thought she'd have trouble falling asleep, but after that long, exhausting day, sleep claimed her almost before she closed her eyes. Whatever they were going to do in the morning, they'd deal with it then.

***

Colleen wasn't sure what woke her. She had no idea what time of night it was, only that it was not yet dawn. The night was pitch dark, a silky blackness so intense it felt smothering. The moon must have set. Misty's breathing was deep and steady beside her. 

She started to sit up and her elbow slammed into something hard, and then she woke all the way in a flailing burst of pure panic. When she tried to move, she slammed into something else, she couldn't even tell what. Rocks? Had she and Misty moved in the night? Had some kind of prison grown up _around_ them? At this point she wouldn't put it past this place. Misty was waking up beside her, groaning out questions.

Colleen couldn't answer; she was too busy trying to find her center and engage the Iron Fist. Finally she seized on it, that wellspring of pure silver calm. The light brightened around her clenched hand, and she found herself and Misty tangled up in a narrow slot between two towers of boxes. At their feet was a looming black edifice that gave her another shocking start until she realized it was black plastic wrapped around something large, thoroughly duct-taped in place.

"What the hell," Misty muttered sleepily. "Is that ... are we back in the storage unit?"

They were. Colleen sat up all the way and found that her jacket was no longer on top of her, or anywhere to be seen, though Misty's was still underneath them. They might have thrown off the topmost jacket in the night. Her shoes and Misty's boots were also missing, along with Misty's bra. It appeared that anything not in contact with their bodies hadn't come back with them.

"Well, I guess it's a good thing I didn't take off the arm." Misty yawned and scratched at her hair. Sand showered down. They'd certainly brought back plenty of that.

Colleen let the Iron Fist die away, and turned on her phone's flashlight app for light. According to the phone's clock it was 4:17 a.m. There were also about twenty missed texts from Danny, which she ignored for the time being; _that_ was a can of worms best not opened yet. She pulled up a corner of the black plastic to check that it was in fact the bureau with the mirror under there, just far enough to see its heavy dark wood before she let it fall back with a shudder.

"We are so torching that thing," Misty said.

They climbed over the boxes in their bare, sandy feet, and discovered that the door was down, hence the impenetrable darkness. Colleen experienced another instant of intense claustrophobia, but Misty, with her metal arm, rolled up the door from the inside with no obvious effort, despite the door not being designed to operate that way.

From outside, there was a yelp of "Jesus Christ on a Christmas cracker!" They found themselves looking into the bright glare of a flashlight with a gun barrel beside it.

"Ronnie?" Misty said, shielding her eyes. "Is that you? Put that damn thing down before you shoot somebody."

"Jesus Christ," the cop said again, lowering the gun. He was young, his face a map of freckles. "What are you doing in there, Lieutenant? We have a full-scale manhunt out for you."

"Well, I'm back now." Misty straightened up and promptly took charge of the scene, in the way that she did. Colleen trailed behind her. The wet pavement was painfully cold on her bare feet. She redirected qi to keep her toes warm.

Their cars were still there. Misty said she was going to stay for a while -- someone had found her a pair of boots that sort of fit.

"You need my help taking care of that?" Colleen asked, jerking her head at the storage unit.

"Nah. Probably nothing's happening soon anyway. Go home."

Colleen felt as if she should stick around for moral support if nothing else, but there really _wasn't_ anything useful that she could do here, and also, she was starving, and her feet were getting cold again. There was sand in the crack of her ass and it was bothering her a lot. Misty was at the center of a circle of her peers, clearly in her element, and Colleen was ... she didn't even know.

She found her car keys -- okay, technically Danny's -- and drove back to Manhattan.

***

Back at the dojo, she took a long shower and washed off all the sand, then made herself a cup of tea and microwaved some leftover pho.

She had completely forgotten about the girdle, yet again, until she went to hang up her jacket and discovered it in the pocket. She laughed softly to herself and shook a little sand out of it. It looked less out of place in the dojo than it had in the Jersey City diner, its frayed edges and soft golds and browns fitting in with Colleen's preferred decor of found and antique things.

Was it _doing_ something in that other place? Colleen wondered, smoothing a hand across it. _Had_ it made Misty fall in love with her, for just a little while?

Did any of that matter, back here in the real world?

She shook her head, had to smile at herself. _You're a grown-up, not a mooning teenager._ She could ask Misty about it, she _would_ ask Misty about it, but Misty was busy and Colleen should probably get some more calories in her and get some sleep that wasn't on a bare strip of sand and rocks in the middle of the desert.

She rolled up the girdle, wrapped it in a scarf, and put it in a box. She'd get it back to Misty eventually. Whatever it did.

Her phone vibrated with an incoming text just as she was making herself another cup of tea. Shit, she thought, Danny -- but instead it was Misty.

_Headed back to town. You still up? I can swing by._

Colleen blew out her breath in a soft sigh. _Yeah sure, come on by._

 _I'll bring pizza,_ Misty texted back.

_My hero._

While she waited, she got her tea and then sat on the couch to finally go back through Danny's texts and see what he knew about the mirror. The answer, as it turned out, was absolutely nothing, though he did run down some various mythological magic mirrors in case it helped.

 _Kind of a moot point now,_ she texted back. _I did actually find out what it did, in case you were wondering why you didn't hear back from me 'til now. It took me somewhere else. Big and green and wild. I met a griffin there._

She was still thinking how to explain the rest when Danny's reply came in. _COOL. I met a griffin once._

She was startled into a laugh. Danny was still Danny. _I told mine a story and gave it a magic ring, and it let me by. How about yours?_

_It basically tried to eat us. Ward says I'm not allowed to talk to any more griffins. Your life is awesome, Colleen._

She leaned her head back against the couch, and laughed again. It really kind of was.

This next bit wasn't going to be easy, but keeping it from him wouldn't make it any easier. And besides ... there was that whole being-a-grown-up thing. She texted, _Misty was there too. We slept together._

She hesitated over it, then hit send.

The response came back right away: _GOOD. Misty's great._

Relief shivered out of her in a long breath. She felt lighter, warmer. _Yeah. She is._

_Must have been the mirror of Erised. :)_

_I knew I'd regret introducing you to Harry Potter._

***

Misty knocked on the door half an hour later. "Remind me never to drive from Jersey to Manhattan at this time of day ever again," she said when Colleen opened it. "The traffic's murder. And these boots are killing me." She shoved a pizza box into Colleen's hands and hopped into the room, already standing on one foot to pull off the ill-fitting brown boots she'd borrowed.

"How's the mirror situation?"

"We had a nice bonfire in a dockside vacant lot," Misty said with relish. "I know it's an appalling misappropriation of evidence and I don't care. We also threw on anything that looked even _slightly_ magical and poured a bunch of diesel on it. Went up like fireworks. I've never seen flames that color before."

Colleen felt a twinge of loss, of regret. But if her experiences with the Crane Sisters and Davos's magic bowl had taught her anything, it was that magic artifacts rarely came without a steep price.

"What about the other guy, the one who went into the mirror before us?" she asked, getting them down plates.

"Oh shit, sorry, I forgot to tell you," Misty said. She plopped on the couch and reached for a pizza slice. "He's back. He showed up about half an hour after you left, in the same storage unit."

"Where did he end up? On the other side, I mean. He sure wasn't where we were."

"Some kind of abandoned city, he said. Nothing but empty buildings for miles and miles. He came back after he fell asleep, too."

So, pure chance, Colleen thought. She got herself a pizza slice, sitting on the couch next to Misty with her legs curled up, her knees almost touching Misty's thigh. There was no meaning to why they had gone to that world, nothing to be gleaned from it, no significance to coming back when they did. Just chance.

Misty ate her pizza in silence for a few bites, caught a stray bit of cheese as it dangled, and then said abruptly, "I owe you an apology."

"For what?" Colleen asked, baffled.

"What do you mean, for what? For the slam, bam, thank you ma'am earlier. I didn't think 'til you drove off that I didn't even really say anything after we got back. Didn't even give you a good morning kiss."

"You were busy." Misty's apology embarrassed her; it made her think about how she could have stepped into Misty's command circle at any time she wanted to, but hadn't. She'd just slipped off quietly, into the night. "I'd have said something if I minded."

"Yeah, well, _I_ minded." Misty chewed pizza again for a minute, then she said abruptly, "Got anything to drink?"

"I can make you some tea. Green or black?"

"I meant something stronger."

"It's like eight in the morning," Colleen complained, but she got up and came back with two cups of sake, clear and sharp.

Misty accepted the cup, holding it in her metal hand, and took a sip. "You know the last time I had a serious relationship?" she asked, lowering the cup.

Colleen shook her head.

"Eight years ago. How sad is that? We came up through the academy together. And then I got promoted to detective over him, and his ego couldn't handle it. He hit the highway. Got a transfer to a different precinct."

"Wow," Colleen said, heartfelt. "Dick move."

"Yeah. You know the worst part? I really loved him, for a while there. Thought we might keep house together. But I haven't actually thought about him in years." Misty shrugged. "The point is, the thing I need to point out is, I'm not the nurturing one in a relationship. I'm a workaholic and I don't have a lot of close friends and sometimes I like my own company better than anyone else's. Let's be real, you can't be a sister and get where I am in the NYPD if you can't also be a hardass, obsessive bitch."

"Do I really need to remind you that my last relationship, my only real serious one, ended when my boyfriend broke up with me in a letter and ran off to Asia with his brother who tried multiple times to kill him?"

Misty smiled behind her cup. "I'm not sure if that means _you're_ bad at relationships."

"It's nice to tell myself that." Colleen rolled the sake cup between her palms. The alcohol burned pleasantly in her throat. "But, no, a breakup is a two-person road. And it's too easy to say that it's just because we were young, even though in an absolute sense neither of us were _that_ young, I mean, I was twenty-seven when we got together. But in another sense we really kind of were. Inexperienced, at least. There are a lot of things I could've done before it got to that point, and a lot of things he could've done." She looked up at Misty. "Point is, relationships are messy, and people are messy. I don't expect anything else."

"C'mon over here, then."

Colleen put down the sake cup and crawled across the couch, on top of her. Misty grinned and flopped back so Colleen could lay on her.

"I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you really need a shower," Colleen told her after some industrious kissing was taken care of.

"Tell me about it," Misty sighed. "Mind if I use yours?"

"I think it'd be an asshole move at this point to tell you that you can't." She grinned against Misty's lips. "There's a price, though."

"Oh really?"

"You might not get to shower alone."

"Oh, so this is one of _those_ establishments."

Colleen laughed. She was tired, and she _still_ had sand in uncomfortable places even after the last shower, and there was a lot about the last day that still needed to settle in her head.

But it was good. _This_ was good. And the rest they could work out later.

And when the next Weird Shit showed up, as it inevitably would ... _Bring it,_ she thought. It had worked out pretty good this time.

"Oh, I have a secret, by the way," Misty said as they got off the couch. "Don't tell anyone, but I might've kept the shawl of invisibility. It looked useful."

"Don't blame you. I still have the belt. I sort of forgot about it."

"Fair. Maybe we can figure out what it does, one of these days."

Colleen slid an arm around her waist. "I don't really care. I don't think it's that important. I might borrow your invisibility cloak, though."

"We should do some experimenting. See if it'll fit two."

Yeah. This was good.


End file.
